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The Current State of Ajax
Dion Hinchcliffe writes "Ajax hasn't even been big a year yet and already open source development tools by the dozen are pouring out. Not to mention big names like TIBCO and Microsoft already have previews on the way of full-fledged IDEs for developing Ajax applications. Ajax may be the biggest software development story of 2005. Dion Hinchcliffe has a detailed article about how Ajax has evolved over the last six months and assesses the current state of tools, libraries, and mindshare. He also points out that Ajax will inadvertently end up being a driving force for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for many organizations since it requires high performance back-end XML services."
Does anybody think of Intel Centrino when they hear AJAX? They are quite similar in the fact that it is just giving a name to using a combination of technologies. Also, has anybody ever heard a Best Buy computer salesman say "This one has a Centrino processor."?
He also points out that Ajax will inadvertently end up being a driving force for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for many organizations since it requires high performance back-end XML services.
Advertising programming languages with a pre-com-bust-style-buzzword-overload isn't very useful for gaining the attention of developers.
Does anyone here know of a good reference for balancing the "gee-whiz, nifty" aspects of ajax techniques with designing towards accessibility? I like the thought of, say, livesearch, but dislike the idea of breaking support for text-to-speech readers, assistive devices, et cetera.
In fact, the article in the story might have a terrific section about just this issue. But I wouldn't know, because the server fell over worse than I do after a gin-and-tonic bender.
Not all of us follow the latest fads. My programming library is kind of like my closet. It's neither worth rebuying your clothes or relearning your skillset annually.
AJAX = Asynchronous Javascript And Xml
It's a terrible name because it says nothing about what it is, only what it is made of. Even then it poorly describes what it is made of, as it can be made of other things too.
So from this CBL (Carbon Based Lifeform) to another, I say, "Goodnight".
The person who makes a technology popular receives technical fame for a good reason -- by making more of the world aware of a good technology, in a way that leads to deployment, the world becomes a better place. Sometimes, popularization adds more value than invention to an idea.
We need to write out business apps in Javascript now because this is the only standard browser vendors can agree on?
Javascript, it's non-standard browser-specific extension syntax and the restrictive, incomplete and non-standard HTML DOM is an awful environment to write apps in, and it illustrates clearly just how dysfunctional the modern software industry is today.
AJAX is a shit way to write apps, it's central concept revolves around badly hacking around a problem that shouldn't even exist in a language that was never intended for use in such a way, its like we've got the worst aspects of every major technology available today, grudgingly provided by browser vendors who are want to take their ball and go home since nobody wants to use their proprietary ActiveX or XUL - in an incompatible fashion and we're supposed to see this as a step forward?
It's stupid, AJAX is stupid, and browser based apps are crap.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
That's something a script should be handling for every site - it has an account on Slashdot, and can see the mysterious future posts - if there's a link to their site in it, it sends an alert to the sysad.
Today I'm architecting a significant new web project and my first order of business on the UI side was to specify XMLHttpRequest (buzzword catchphrase, yuck.) as the core around which the client would be developed. It's working fantastically. It simplifies just about everything, imho, once the basics are in place.
It is now possible to do highly-reactive monitoring applications in a browser without applets, plug-ins, or frames+script chicanery. Download the core app, then stream in the rest of the bits behind the scenes. Sweet!
The clients love it, we love to develop using it. Win, win situation - a strange place to be on an IT project.
-- All views expressed in this post are mine and do not
-- reflect those of my employer or their clients
I have to ask why all this is news lately? There's nothing new about using JavaScript to asynchronously update a portion of a page. At my company (where I am the Web Services lead) we have been using this technique since 2001, and I don't begin to think we're on the leading edge of that. There have been people doing this since probably 1999.
I ask the question, but I really know the answer. Somebody stuck the word "XML" in it and it suddenly became the holy grail of Web programming. It's a good methodology for doing certain things, and I've honestly got to say if you didn't know how to do this before the last few months of hype, you're either not a Web programmer or you're on the bottom end of the Web programmer stack.
(Why complain? It's really, really annoying to have the things you've been doing day-to-day for 4 years be ignored while new people doing it are suddenly "powerful" and "cool" just because someone said it had XML in it.)
If you want to get the most out of AJAX, pass the information back to the client in a compact XML form. I recommend a format with one element per record with attributes for record columns. The whole point of AJAX is to keep the information tyou pass for each request between the client and server to a minimum. Of course, I couldn't fin the XMLHTTPRequest declation in your code either.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I blame W3C! W3C is too slow to address hunger for RIA on the Internet. W3C becames to be more playground for big corporations trying to extend their influence (or sabotage anything that could harm their business) and not a forum for consensual agreements to benefit everybody (if it ever was the meaning of W3C).
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
It WAS available back in 2001. In IE ;)
No. "AJAX" uses the XMLHttpRequest object to dynamically load things from the server. You have been able to do such things in the past with hidden frame hacks, but AJAX doesn't require hidden frames. Anybody who has actually used XMLHttpRequest knows this.
No, it's perfectly possible to develop a website that uses AJAX and is compatible with Lynx. It's no different to any other use of Javascript.
Except a Javascript engine is not required to get at the data unless you've constructed your website incorrectly. Furthermore, AJAX typically exposes data in an XML format as well, making it more useful to applications consuming data.
The only thing I can derive from this statement is that you haven't got the first clue about AJAX or Javascript in general. There is nothing about either that locks out search engines. It is only clueless developers that locks out search engines. Unfortunately, many developers listening to your rhetoric about "AJAX or search engines" are going to choose AJAX, not realising that they don't need to choose.
You seem to have the misconception that bookmarks are incompatible with AJAX. This is not the case.
Again, you are giving the impression that you don't have experience with RSS or SOAP.
RSS is a format for providing a list of items that is intended to be updated on a regular basis. While you could use a subset of HTML for the list, HTML doesn't provide the semantics for the "updated on a regular basis" bit. For example, there's no equivalent to the <ttl> element type.
SOAP is a protocol for exposing objects, their properties and their methods to remote systems. HTML doesn't do this. HTTP comes close, but the only way to get browsers to be flexible enough to use HTTP's verbs and resources as substitutes for SOAP's methods and objects is to use AJAX.
I'm sorry, but your whole rant comes over as being rather uninformed. Sure, AJAX is no panacea, but your criticisms don't make sense.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Oh, you mean the kind of responsiveness and bandwidth conserving that every IMAP-capable email application can deliver? The kind of application that you don't need to download from a webpage every time you want to use it, but instead is installed locally? The kind that runs natively on your machine, instead of living in a webbrowser?
The emperor is naked.